How to Set & Achieve Marketing Goals With a Year-End Review

The start of a new year is always exciting. It’s a fresh opportunity to embrace new sales and marketing goals and make progress toward them. In this article, you’ll learn how to set marketing goals with a year-end review. This will clarify what you need to be doing in the months ahead to reach the goals that you set.

I’ll also be sharing with you a couple of free resources that you can use to help you along your journey to creating your best year yet in business. Let’s get into those tips!

how to set marketing goalsGather all Tracked Data

The first step for how to set marketing goals is to first gather all of the marketing data that you have been collecting throughout the year and gain insights for your next steps. Pay special attention to the following three specific areas to measure your success.

  • Social media insights
  • CRM data
  • Website traffic

Social Media Insights

Before you look at your social media insights, you want to be clear on the goal you had in mind when you started at the beginning of the year. It may be that you’re looking for leads or you’re looking to increase brand awareness. If your aim is brand awareness, are you getting engagement? Are you getting shares, likes, and comments? If your goal was lead generation, tally the number of new clients this year who found you via social media.

CRM Data

If you’ve used a customer relationship management tool (CRM) this year, you should have details about where the majority of your customers throughout the year have come from. It may be in-person networking, referrals, or social media. This is important to know because you want to continue to focus your efforts there, as well as potentially focus efforts on other areas that did generate some leads, but you want to strengthen.

I personally use Monday.com to keep track of all of the new clients and leads that I receive throughout the year. This helps me to stay on top of when I need to reach out to people as they progress through the buyer’s journey. It also helps me to understand where the majority of my customers are coming from. So, be sure to look and see what your trends are.

If you’re not currently using a CRM, it’s never too late to get started. Start with one this year and use it regularly to improve your lead generation and conversions.

Website Traffic

The third set of data that will guide you on how to set marketing goals is to track is your website traffic. If you aren’t doing this already, you can get started with the free tool, Google Analytics. And, here’s a simple video tutorial on how to set it up for your WordPress website!

Once you are tracking your website traffic, you’ll know how many people are arriving at your website every month and it helps you to know what traffic sources bring the most people to your website. You’ll want to continuously apply efforts to your strongest source of traffic. And, if you have a secondary high source of traffic, you may choose to apply more effort in that area as well.

Another reason to track website traffic is to know how well your web pages are doing at converting traffic into leads. A lot of my clients ask me what they need to do with their websites to attract more leads. Should they change their wording? Does the brand need adjusting? Without website traffic metrics, it’s hard to tell what the correct answer is.

If you’re not getting enough traffic in the first place, then that could be the reason why you’re not getting leads from your website. If you ARE getting loads of traffic, and you’re still not getting leads, that’s an indication that your website needs an adjustment.

Review Your Results

Now we’re on Step 2 of your year-end review, which will help you to set marketing goals (and achieve them). In this step, you’ll determine how well you did at reaching the goals you set at the beginning of the year. Along those lines, I promised to give you a couple of free resources that will help you make this year your best one yet. The first one I recommend to review your previous results and determine your new marketing plan is to download my free 2024 Marketing and Sales Planner. This is a full workbook and guide to help you reflect on what worked — and what didn’t — over the course of the year. You’ll also be guided to craft a new, exciting vision for the year ahead. Inside it, you’ll find Journaling Prompts, Goal-Setting Sheets, and Quarterly & Monthly planners.

The second free resource is my Marketing Metrics Tracker. This is a spreadsheet that you can use in Google Sheets or Excel to keep tabs this year on how you’re progressing toward the goals you’ve set. It includes everything that you can possibly track from your website traffic, social media insights, paid ads, videos, and so much more.

These free resources, plus the year-end review, will help you to set meaningful marketing goals and keep tabs on them to progress further and faster in your business. Rather than wondering how you’re doing, you’ll have a clear picture of what you’re accomplishing and areas that can be improved to reach your client and income goals.

Determine the Next Steps

Now we’ve made it to step three of your year-end review and that is to determine if you met your goals or you didn’t. What are the next steps for your marketing and how can you apply them to the year ahead?

If you met your goals, congratulations! Ask yourself these questions:

  • Did you set your goal high enough last year?
  • What contributed to your success?
  • What will you continue to do in the year ahead to maintain results?

If you believe your goals were conservative, be sure to stretch yourself with your vision for the year ahead.

Now, if you DIDN’T reach your goals, ask yourself these questions:

  • Did you apply enough effort toward them?
  • Did you forget about your goals because you weren’t looking at them?
  • What could you do differently this year in order to get better results?
  • Do you need to hire help to achieve your goals?
  • Is there anything in particular that you need to learn?

 

You also want to look for trends in your data. In every business, certain times of the year are slower than others in every business. Personally, I know specifically when I’m going to see a dip in business. But, this is not something that we’re locked into! This is an opportunity to plan ahead the marketing activities that we can do to maintain – or even expand – our online presence so we’re not experiencing dips in our income at that time of the year.

Final steps: How to set marketing goals (and achieve them)

The answers to these questions, and the insights that you gain from your year-end review, can be applied to the  Marketing & Money Goals Planner. Add the marketing activities you will focus on to the quarterly worksheets that are included. This will ensure you’re clear on the steps you will take each month and quarter to those big vision goals that you set for yourself.

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